A continuous viral respiratory surveillance program was established throughout the U.S. Department of Defense beneficiary population living in Europe with a few specimens coming from the Middle East. This program provided influenza rapid antigen test kits, specimen collection kits, detailed instructions, and a questionnaire. Training on specimen collection and testing was provided to health car...

BACKGROUND Infectious disease marker testing is obligatory for the release of human tissue for transplantation. Most CE-marked tests are not validated for postmortem blood. In a previous study we have validated the testing for anti-HIV-1/2, anti-HCV, HBsAg, and anti-HBc. Here, we present the validation of testing for antibodies against T. pallidum, which is the last marker obligatory for tissue...

The use of combined Anti-Retroviral Therapy (cART) has been revolutionary in the history of the fight against HIV-AIDS, with remarkable reductions in HIV associated morbidity and mortality. Knowing one's HIV status early, not only increases chances of early initiation of effective, affordable and available treatment, but has lately been associated with an important potential to reduce disease t...

UNLABELLED Background This study assessed the feasibility and acceptability of pharmacy and home-based sexually transmissible infection (STI) screening as alternate testing venues among emergency contraception (EC) users. METHODS The study included two phases in February 2011-July 2012. In Phase I, customers purchasing EC from eight pharmacies in Manhattan received vouchers for free STI testi...

1 1 Background: What is science? Beyond Popper and Lakatos 2 Fundamental and Derived Construction Kits (FCK, DCKs) 2.1 The variety of biological construction kits 2.2 More varied mathematical structures 3 Construction kits generate possibilities and impossibilities 3.1 Construction kits for making information-users 3.2 Different roles for information 3.3 Motivational mechanisms 3.4 Biological c...

We have developed a SNP microarray for paternity testing, which contains 10 SNPs and in addition X and Y chromosome-specific markers. SNPs were selected with an emphasis on their high allele frequency in the Finnish population. Coding regions of known genes were excluded. With this setup of SNPs, we have calculated the average exclusion power in paternity testing to be 86.5%. The array was vali...

In this paper we present the agent architecture development environment ADE, intended for the design, implementation, and testing of distributed agent architectures. After a short review of architecture development tools, we discuss ADE’s unique features that place it in the intersection of multiagent systems and development kits for single agent architectures. A detailed discussion of the gene...

Healthcare providers use antinuclear antibodies (ANAs) to screen and diagnose patients with autoimmune diseases. In the recent years, commercial multiplex ANA kits have emerged as a convenient and fast diagnostic method. Diagnostic testing should follow sequenced algorithms: initial screen followed by specific antibody analysis. Second-level testing as an initial screen for autoimmune disease i...